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This week’s story, “Any Human Heart,” opens as a well-dressed elderly woman is watching the goings on around her from a bench on a busy road in a New Jersey town. She’s talking—silently—to herself, judging the people who pass her by. When did this premise, and the character of Maureen, come to you?
I’ve often noticed elderly people sitting on benches wherever I go. They easily blend into the surrounding landscapes—in a park, at a bus stop, or, in the case of Maureen, a human sculpture next to a real sculpture of Bruce Springsteen. Maureen, by dressing exquisitely, demands not to be simply written off—that was where the story began for me: attention demanded, and so attention given.
Maureen might strike a reader as an amusing character initially, but she’s a formidable presence. Are we ever misled by age or appearance when it comes to assessing someone’s qualities?
Oftentimes, or perhaps, all the time! I remember seeing the pictures of Augusto Pinochet toward the end of his life—he might as well be a harmless grandfather. Or, seeing a picture of Madame Mao as a teen-ager—she might as well be a classmate of mine in high school. Fortunately, fiction allows one the space to complicate matters and dispel the innocence of any image.
This is the third of your recent stories to feature the same character, Lilian. In each one, another woman acts as a foil to Lilian, but the perspective shifts from story to story. In the first, “Particles of Order,” set in the English countryside, we view Lilian from the perspective of Ursula, the manager of a rental cottage, but we’re not privy to Lilian’s unspoken thoughts. In the second, “Techniques and Idiosyncrasies,” the situation is reversed. The story inhabits Lilian’s point of view, and a nurse is the figure we don’t know. And here, after Maureen invites Lilian to lunch, we move back and forth between their two points of view. Is it easier to write when you’re looking at Lilian or when you’re looking out at the world through her eyes?
It’s infinitely easier to write about Lilian from another character’s point of view—the distance between me and Lilian, who shares some of my life story, allows me to align with the world. I laughed when writing about Maureen’s disapproval of Lilian’s “slowness” and her feeling that Lilian “looked ghastly.” However, these Lilian stories are about what she calls “the state of finality,” an extremity that is not shared by many of the characters she encounters. After the first story, I realized that Lilian’s perspective is essential—one must tackle the harder things.
In the second section of the story, we learn that Lilian has recently returned from a trip to Germany with her husband. Underlying every seemingly normal aspect of a vacation is the awareness of the deaths of their two sons. Does travel allow for any form of escape from memory, or is escape impossible?
Lilian calls travelling a “geographic distraction”: going to new places, seeing some unfamiliar scenery, talking to and eavesdropping on strangers, and yet knowing that the inescapable, which is her life, remains inescapable. The fact that we cross borders, metaphorical and literal, and continue to be our old selves can be comforting and unsettling at the same time.
At the lunch, Maureen is going to take the pain Lilian feels and use it for her own ends. She has a story that she wants to tell, and Lilian is her chosen audience. There’s an almost audacious cruelty to this. Does Maureen know she’s being cruel? Is that part of the pleasure she’ll derive from this encounter? Or is it simply that she wants the right listener?
Audacious cruelty—it’s precisely that. I might have shivered inwardly when I was writing the lunch scene: Maureen is set to cause pain and perturbation to Lilian, and Lilian is bound to be dumbfounded, a result designed by Maureen. Does she know she’s being cruel? I think so, but I suppose she doesn’t mind it, and she sees it as life’s necessity that she’s teaching Lilian a lesson. People who inflict pain and commit atrocities are good at justifying their behavior.
Maureen’s story is about the revenge she enacted against her ex-husband and his second wife. Did you know from the outset what form her revenge would take? Why did you choose flowers?
I knew before writing the story that it would center on the flowers Maureen sent to torment her ex-husband and his second wife. Flowers, beautiful and impermanent as they are, can be weapons, too. What surprised me: the evenhandedness and the levelheadedness with which Maureen explains the effect of the flowers to Lilian. I think the shock Lilian receives is that the extreme pain of losing her children has not prepared her for the fact that “real human cruelty lies in the realm of the articulable.”
The story takes its title from a line of Henry James, “Never say you know the last words about any human heart.” Maureen quotes this to Lilian, who doesn’t hide her impatience at its citation. Does the story prove Henry James right, or do you get to have the last word about Maureen’s heart as the author of the story?
The Henry James quote, widely circulated, can be true and yet a cliché, which makes Lilian impatient. But perhaps I can allow myself to be momentarily arrogant and say that I do feel I get to have the last word about Maureen’s heart.
The first Lilian story opens with a pear. This closes with one. Was that a conscious echo? Is there something about the particular beauty and fragility of the fruit that lends itself to fiction?
I didn’t realize the return of the pear until you pointed it out! This may be explained by my longtime fascination with pears. In college, I took a botany course, and I remember dissecting a pear and looking at the stone cells—a particular type of cell found in plants—under the microscope. Pears, more noticeably than other fruits, have these stone cells with thicker cell walls, which give the flesh a gritty texture; no doubt, the better pears are cultivated to make the stone cells less noticeable to the human palate. Despite that, pears are known as a delicate fruit, featured in still-life paintings and poetry. I suppose my fascination with them has subconsciously introduced a pattern to the Lilian stories.
For the past five years, you were in a book club of two with the writer Edmund White. You’ve written a lovely tribute to White, who died on June 3rd, at the age of eighty-five, for The Yale Review. In “Particles of Order,” you bestowed his first name upon a mystery writer. Can you feel his presence elsewhere in your work?
This will be my first publication that I won’t be able to show Edmund. Over the years, characters named Edmund, Eddie, or Edwina have shown up in my stories, all as a nod to him, and usually we would have a good laugh about it. When we read novels and stories together, often he would choose some passages of dialogue and read them aloud, so now whenever I write dialogue I have his reading voice in my head. ♦
